With early voting beginning today, Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and his Democrat challenger Robert “Beto” O’Rourke have clarified their policy positions on border security as President Joe Biden’s border policies exacerbate the crisis.
Recent polling shows twice as many Texas voters prefer Abbott’s border policies over O’Rourke’s.
The Texas GOP has made securing the border and protecting Texans a legislative priority for the 2023 session, as Texans have been sounding the alarm for over a year now regarding the devastation to property, livelihoods, and human life.
According to former U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan, Abbott has “done more than any other governor” in the country; however, there is still more Abbott could be doing, and counties across the state are requesting he declare an invasion.
Meanwhile, O’Rourke has said that the Texas Guard deployed to the southern border as part of Operation Lone Star—Texas’ border security effort intended to detect and interdict illegal border-crossers—is “a solution in search of a problem.”
He said the same thing in 2019 about then-President Donald Trump’s border wall, advocating to “take the wall down.”
However, on the first day of his gubernatorial campaign last year, O’Rourke criticized the Biden administration for not making the border crisis enough of a priority.
O’Rourke has since focused his campaign on issues like legalizing marijuana and expanding Medicaid rather than tackling the contentious topic of the Texas-Mexico border, which he has so far avoided even calling a crisis.
Border security is expected to be a losing issue for Democrats this midterm election as the Democrat Party cannot seem to agree whether there is a crisis at all. Meanwhile, citizens are fed up with the current “third-world country” conditions in South Texas.
The latest polling from the University of Texas Tyler and Dallas Morning News shows 48 percent of Texans believe Abbott will do a better job of securing the border—twice as many as the 24 percent who believe O’Rourke would.
Election Day is November 8. Early voting runs from October 24 through November 4.
